The Honeymoon Workbook

The Chicago trio Good Willsmith—three 20-somethings using synths, pedals, and loop stations to make drifting, abstract music—spent years concocting fascinating small-run releases. The semi-public woodshedding culminates on The Honeymoon Workbook, a continuous 41-minute suite.

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Chicago trio Good Willsmith formed in 2012, and The Honeymoon Workbook is their first widely-released LP. But it’s not really a debut: in the past two years, they’ve made a slew of fascinating small-run releases, all of which saw them steadily growing their sound into something both recognizable and capable of surprise. The semi-public woodshedding culminates on The Honeymoon Workbook, as the group pours many of the ideas and strengths they’ve developed into one continuous 41-minute suite.

The details behind the work are familiar: three 20-somethings using synths, pedals, and loop stations to make drifting, abstract music. The scenario makes it tempting to slot Good Willsmith in with other post-Emeralds outfits melding noise, drone, and new age. But the distinct shape of The Honeymoon Workbook deserves to be assessed on its own terms. It’s a shape that derives partially from method: the group semi-composed a set using some planned cues and graphical scores, honed it during a 2013 tour, then executed it in one live recording session without any subsequent edits or multi-tracking.

As a result, The Honeymoon Workbook stirs up the space between controlled narrative and open possibility. On “& my body to breath” a fuzzy pulse frames the sorts of tone waves and vocal moans that Double Leopards once perfected. Reliably-rhythmic synths melt into haze on “Taking too long to text,” recalling the easy ascension of Beaches and Canyons-era Black Dice. Some tropes emerge that in other hands could sound stale, like the rippling, Terry Riley-like bleep of “Now—shower put on all black”, or the dramatic voice samples sprinkled throughout. But Good Willsmith breathes new life into such familiar sounds, giving them a sense of purpose, as if every piece is completing a puzzle or unlocking a new one.

That drive is part of a simple, effective tactic: continual forward motion. There are no pauses on The Honeymoon Workbook, even though it’s presented as seven discrete tracks—a division that’s not simply convenient indexing. Each section has its own arc that builds on the previous and sets up its successor. They’re like lines in a poem, which is perhaps why their titles sound like verse fragments: “I told you to get up and it just happened”, “What you think is crazy isn’t”, “If anything happens to me, my password is Lady Lass”. The latter finds Good Willsmith at their most transcendent, turning columns of air, thatches of disembodied hums, and radio-preacher bites into a unified chorus of friendly strangers.

That description might sound forbidding, but one of the most impressive things about The Honeymoon Workbook is how welcoming, even comfortable it sounds. The group’s name—a half-joking pormanteau of Good Will Hunting and Will Smith—is meant as self-defense; as member Max Allison explained to me recently, “if [people] can't get past the name, they're probably not going to have patience to endure the sounds.” It’s an admirable idea, but probably an unneccesary one. Because while The Honeymoon Workbook doesn’t hold back, it never feels like Good Willsmith are engaged in a battle. They sound less interested in conjuring sonic spirits through conflict than through communication and concentration.